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Opiniorate.com

Empowering employees

Opiniorate is a free social media kind of online service under development for individuals offering them effective communication channels. These individuals can be people looking for information from employees about the working conditions in their company. But employees from the same company can also exchange ideas about their work. They can do this without repercussions by using an account that will hide their identiy.

Users will be registered as working for a company with help of their email address used during registration. Opiniorate is a nonexistent word but you can see it as a merger of two existing words: opinion and rate.

For job seekers

Imagine that a job seeker is interested in a company. He or she studies the company's website and reads interviews with people who work there. They tell how nice and challenging their work is. But how can the job seeker know for sure that the full story is told and that it is not just a story from the pen of the PR department? Opiniorate offers help. On Opiniorate job seekers will find people who are willing to answer questions about their employer anonymously. On Opiniorate job seekers (and others) can follow threads from employees of companies writing about the pros and cons of working at their company.

Authentic communication

Everywhere where people work there are issues that everyone identifies as problems but are nevertheless not addressed. Fearing his career nobody dares to confront the problems. Thus conversations in many meetings or other work settings are not authentic. They often don’t deal with the real issues that are blocking progress. Real conversations take place in the hallways after the meeting. Employees longing for authentic communication about problems at work may benefit from Oniorate. At Opiniorate they can voice their opinions anonymously without having to fear that they’ll be labeled as not being loyal.

Opiniorate is also a service for unions that are interested in what is happening at the workplace of a company. They can use an account that identifies them as ‘a union’ and gives them a voice in discussions.

Brave employers

At Opiniorate we would like to see employers who dare to engage in discussions with their employees. Doing so makes them top employers. They can use an account that identifies them as ‘the employer’ and gives them a voice in discussions on Opiniorate. And they will benefit according to experts.

In an attention-grabbing article in Fortune issued in May 2002 Ram Charan and Jerry Useem elaborated on the fall of several US Fortune 500 companies. They conclude that corporate failure is often related to managerial error. Poor communication is mentioned as one of the facts causing the errors. The boss is more feared than the competition. Charan and Useem quote Daniel Goleman, a psychologist, saying that subordinates are afraid to tell the boss the truth. Even when a boss doesn't intend to quash dissent, subtle signals - a sour expression, a curt response - can broadcast the message that bad news isn't welcome.

Opiniorate now offers new ways to inform the boss and to help him or her to prevent managerial errors based on a lack of information.

Challenges

Though communicating users are the value of Opiniorate they could also be the cause of problems. In order to avoid misbehaving or the disclosure of business secrets some measures are implemented. They are addressed in the Rules of conduct. The following rules are mentioned there reducing this risk:
- You may not in any way attempt or allow others to use the services to engage in fraudulent or criminal acts, spread 'adult content' advertisements or unwanted mails (spam) or threaten other persons or organizations. If you do so your account will be blocked, your contributions will be deleted and your email address and IP number will be disclosed for investigation. - Don't use music, images, video, or other content that you don't have the rights to. Using copyrighted material is almost always against the law and can lead to expensive lawsuits. - Exercise restraint. If your comments and other content do not contribute to making a general issue discussable they will be removed from the website. - It is strictly forbidden to use Opiniorate for disclosing business secrets. If your employer in a complaint can prove that such a situation arises that may be a reason for us to make known your email address to your employer.

Crowd funding

Opiniorate.com runs momentarily still in a technical environment sharing resources with other websites on a shared server. This will not allow a large number of visitors. To guarantee a secure operation the regular installation of software updates of source code is also necessary.

Once we are operating in the right technical environment this should mean that many thousands of new visitors and users would be able to benefit for free from the services.
With help of crowd funding our aim is to add a total of some 200 companies to the website over the next two years. Sponsors will be given a say in the selection of companies that will be added.

With extra means we can also continue to work on further improving the website with new features and more content (see for example our compilations of the histories of McDonald's Corporation and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.).

We are very interested in any comments on our crowd funding plan and suggestions for incentives we could offer sponsors. You can send them using our contact page.